A Thousand Tiny, Jagged Pieces
by Howling1
Summary: Before Willow goes on her rampage against the remaining members of the Trio, she makes a little stop at a cafe in Ireland ... and confronts Oz. Major angst, spoilers through Season 6. Please R&R!


When the coffee you just paid seven American dollars for is blasted rudely and abruptly off of the café table by a random bolt of lighting, and you're not on the Hellmouth, it's rarely a sign of everyday activity.

Which is why it was such a surprise for Oz when he stood up from his chair and whirled around to find his former girlfriend had somehow followed him to this quaint little town in Ireland.

Rarely a man of few words, Oz had trouble deciding on his first.

"What ... Willow?" he finally managed. Not the most original of concepts, but it worked. "What are you doing here?"

"Oz," Willow said, a terrible smirk on her face as she stepped closer to him, and Oz shivered. This wasn't Willow, it wasn't the _real_ Willow, wasn't the Willow he knew and had fallen in love with. "Oz, Oz, Oz."

"That'd, uh, be me," said Oz in a tone of forced casualness as he took in her appearance. The veins on her face, the dark hair, the evil, black, empty eyes. "God, Willow, what... what _happened_ to you?"

"You know, I never properly thanked you," Willow said, and when Oz looked around again they suddenly weren't in the café, they were in a desert. Sunnydale Desert, by the looks of it, though he couldn't be sure; all of them started to look alike after awhile. "For shattering my heart into a thousand tiny, jagged pieces and all."

Oz hadn't expected that. He stepped back like he had been physically punched in the chest; for the rush of emotion that accompanied Willow's words, he might as well have been.

"Willow, I ... it ... I couldn't ... I had to," he finally managed. Willow circled him all the while as he talked, her eyes never blinking, her black soulless eyes, watching him like a hawk watches its prey. "It was the only way to keep you safe —"

"Shut up," Willow said, and pinched two of her fingers together like she was holding a needle. Oz found, abruptly, that he couldn't talk.

"But hey," she continued, smirking evilly again, "it's over now, right? The past is the past and all that. I mean, so what if _Veruca_ made you stray ... it doesn't matter anymore because she's dead, right? She's dead, Warren's dead, Tara's dead, it's all a big fun party of dead-ness."

Oz didn't know who Warren was ... and then his mind processed the rest of what Willow had said. Willow, noting his comprehension, snapped her fingers and the bind on Oz's mouth was lifted.

"Tara's ... dead?" he said, his insides seeming to turn to ice. This wasn't right, none of it was, things weren't supposed to be like this. "Willow ... I'm — I'm so sorry—"

"No you're not," Willow said, and with a wave of her hand Oz was silenced again. "You don't even care." Dawning comprehension formed in her cold empty eyes. "In some weird, twisted, perverse way, you're _glad_ this happened."

"That's not true," Oz whispered, sincerely, forcing the words through the bind before Willow waved her hand again.

"I told you to shut up."

Oz eyed her, lips not moving, slowly beginning to realize that at this point he was actually afraid of Willow. Cute, spunky, good-girl Willow, transformed somehow into this black, veiny, despairing ... _monster_.

"Yeah, it's true," Willow said, nodding, seeming to convince herself. "In some subconscious recess of your mind, Tara's out of your way, so now ... now you and I can finally be together. That's the way people's minds work, isn't it? In the end, everybody's only out for themselves. Buffy, living her life as the 'Chosen One', believing she's so much better than everybody else ... Dawn—" (_Who was Dawn?_) "— whining her way through mishap after mishap ... Xander, too busy making stupid jokes and boo-hooing over Anya to give a damn about anybody else ... and Warren — Warren, fancying himself a Slayer of a Slayer, not caring what ... _who_ he hurts in his haste to get there..."

For the first time, her voice was wavering — and so was her magic.

"_Willow!_" Oz shouted, voice bursting through the mystical energy fold. "Willow, stop, _please_. Something's wrong — you need help — what _happened_ to you?" he asked again, pleading this time.

"And you," Willow said softly, apparently not having heard a word, "leaving me, leaving Sunnydale, leaving the entire _continent_ because you were too damn busy running away from your own power. Fearing it. Letting it own you. Well, guess what, _Puppy?_"

She suddenly raised both arms above her head and Oz was thrown violently upward, landing in a patch of dry grass several yards away. Oz let out a guttural gasp as the wind was knocked out of him; he heard a sickening _crack_ and knew he'd broken a rib. And suddenly Willow was in front of him again.

"I've got power," she said, smirking again. "I've got _loads_ of power. I've got so much magical energy in me that I could take on you and a hundred of _your kind_ and come out without even a scratch. And you know what? I'm not afraid of it. _I_ control it. I _embrace_ it. That is the difference between you and me, Oz."

And suddenly she was next to him, crouching down, her hands on his bleeding chest, her mouth very close to his ear in a mockery of a loving gesture. "When things get tough for you ... you _run_. When things get tough for me ... I get tougher."

Another hurl of her arms and Oz was in the air again, landing back where they'd started, his foot becoming entangled in a fallen cactus. Oz let out a strangled yell — blood was everywhere now, on his chest, on his foot, on his hands where Willow had touched his chest and then held them—

"Willow. Why are you doing this?" he whispered painfully, as she appeared in front of him again.

Willow tilted her eyes upward mockingly, appearing to think about it, before saying simply, "Because it's your fault."

Oz was breathing hard. It hurt to breathe. But he had to keep doing it to live. Funny thing. "I didn't make you this way."

"No, you just dumped me and left me so shell-shocked and brokenhearted that you turned me off from ever dating men again."

"That's not ... how that stuff works," Oz grunted, struggling to get up, standing on his feet shakily. "And you ... _know_ it."

Willow shrugged. "Maybe. But here's the thing, Oz. If you hadn't dumped me? Let Veruca seduce you, the whole deal? Maybe we'd still be together. Maybe we'd even be, oh, I don't know ... _happy_."

She said the last word with such hatred and bitterness that Oz half expected her to spit acid. He wouldn't have been surprised either way.

"You wouldn't have been happy," he said, simply, and for the first time Willow looked taken aback. "It's because ... of Tara that you discovered what ... _who_ it is you can truly be happy with. If you'd stayed with me, you'd have been miserable. Not then, maybe not for a long time, but you would have realized, eventually."

He knew he was taking a risk by saying this, but she needed to hear it. "It was going to end in tears either way, Willow."

Willow stared at him for a moment, her eyes fading from black to their usual brown, before—

"Don't tell me that," she said suddenly, and a whirlwind of dust blew up between the two of them, blocking her from Oz's view.

Oz gritted his teeth, shut his eyes and barreled through the makeshift tornado, ending up in front of Willow again.

"I have to," he gasped. "I could never lie to you, Willow."

"You're lying now!" she shouted back; there was a tinge of hysteria to her words. "You, Buffy, Xander, Anya, everybody, all of you are _liars!_"

"Willow, stop," Oz said, vision blurry with tears now. "Stop, please," he begged. "You're better than this."

"_Liar!_" Willow shouted again. "_Every single one of you are liars!_ The only person who wasn't, who meant more than the world to me, who made me want to be a better person every single day of my life, is _gone_ and if I'd never met you things wouldn't have ended up like this! It's _your fault_, it has to be!"

"You can't blame this on me, Willow," Oz choked. "You can try, you can try as hard as you damn well want and I'll take all of the blame if that helps in any way. I'll still—"

"_Don't_," Willow growled, voice tinted with mystical energy.

"You can fight almost anything with magic," Oz breathed. "I see that now. But you can't fight what you feel."

Oz lowered his head, steeled his resolve, and looked up again, meeting Willow's gaze. "And it's not going to bring Tara back."

Willow's dark, empty eyes stared into Oz's soft green ones for what felt like an eternity ... then Willow screamed, a long, guttural inhuman scream as she threw her head back, raising her hands; a blue glow erupted out of them and Oz was bathed in it, bathed in the field of energy that followed him as he was thrown into the air for the last time and twisted and writhed from the pain—

And he was back in Ireland, falling with a crash into the café table, breaking it, attracting shocked yells as customers fled in panic. Only now did Oz let himself feel it, as the cafe emptied out and he was alone — his flesh erupted into fur and he writhed in his own agony, shifting to the wolf, stronger ears assaulted by the sound of his clothing tearing and inhuman grunts and howls escaping from his throat—

Oz's world was one of pain. He twisted and snarled and rolled in the wreckage of the table, the shock and hurt and _pain_ filling him, drilling into every last nerve in his mind, every last pore in his body — he shifted to Oz to the wolf to Oz and back again, changed and unchanged, feral and human, controlled and primal. Seeing her, what she'd been through, what she'd done, what she was _doing_ — all of it boiled up and surged through him and rolled over him until Oz could barely think, could barely breathe, could barely remember how to live...

Spent and exhausted and not even sure he was himself any more, Oz collapsed in the wreckage, panting and whining heavily until his snout shrank back into his face, the fur transformed back into skin, the claws slid back into nails and remained that way, and he was finally, at last, human again...

Only now, as he remained there, shivering, naked and aching, did Oz finally take in a deep, shuddering breath, and with it came the tears, hard and fast and overwhelming, spilling up out of his eyes and down his face and into the carpet and seemingly _everywhere_, blurring his vision and dampening his hands, as he raised them to cover his face. Oz cried, sobbing for Willow and what he'd done, what had happened so long ago and what had happened now, all of it, everything. He rolled onto his side and curled into a ball, ignoring the searing pain of his broken rib, of the traces of cactus still lingering in his foot, of the wounds all over his body from which blood still seeped. All of it meant nothing; the tears meant everything, Willow meant everything, his world was nothing because she _was_ his world, and the tears were the only thing that he had left.

Oz cried.


End file.
